As a graduate student, I access scientific literature very frequently. For me, it's as simple as logging in through my institution's library website, where I'm directed through a proxy server whereby I can access the full catalogs of most of the major databases (Elsevier, JStor, ACS, etc.). However, for the average person, accessing the latest scientific publications can be impossible. Most of the major databases require a subscription or a one time fee (which can be $50 for one article) to access the content. No one wants to shell out $50 every time they're curious about something new.
Sci-Hub is seeking to change that.
Founded in 2011, Sci-Hub is a project that seeks to enable free access to all scientific literature, albeit through means that may be less than ethical. Sci-Hub pirates scientific papers and republishes them for free (their website now resides on the Dark Web due to takedown efforts by major journal publishers). A new study on the comprehensiveness of Sci-Hub found that it contains 68.9% of all scholarly literature- that's over 55 million articles.
Scientific journal subscriptions are quite expensive. When I was an undergraduate student, I remember talking to some of the librarians at my institution about how much they pay for the subscriptions, and the numbers were astonishing. In its 2015-2016 Annual Report, the libraries at NC State University stated its collections expenditures, that is, the amount spent on subscriptions to academic journals and databases, at over $11 million. Remarkably, the report states that this amount is far below others in NC State's peer group, including Texas A&M, which spent over $27 million on collections. These expenditures start to make even less sense when you consider that many of the scientific articles that universities pay handsomely for are funded by taxpayer dollars through various organizations such as the National Science Foundation. Should taxpayers have access to research findings that they helped fund?
Another issue is the profitability of the database companies. RELX Group, the owner of Elsevier, has a market capitalization of $42.8 billion. In 2016, the company had an operating revenue of nearly $10 billion with a profit margin of 25%. The RELX Group has also been the subject of boycotts by researchers who believe such profits on academic research are unacceptable.
The debate over whether taxpayers should have access to government-funded research has also been the subject of several bills introduced in Congress, including one which would have made it illegal for the government to release research published by private companies, regardless of whether the research was funded by government grants. Another bill was introduced that would have allowed taxpayer access to research. Neither bill passed.
Will Sci-Hub's crusade cause database companies to rethink their pricing model? Will Congress take action to allow open access to government-funded research?
As the debate continues, it would certainly mean more for education to have open access to all academic research, but should it come in the form of piracy? For now, I'll continue working on my research project in graduate school, hoping that some day I'll get to publish an article in a journal. When that time comes, I suppose I'll have the choice of viewing the paper via my library's proxy, but when it comes to sharing the publication with friends and family outside of academia, well that's another story.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this subject, especially if you're involved in academic research like me. Feel free to leave comments and questions below.
This article was inspired by @steemiteducation, an account dedicated to all things education.
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